“Swell.” She tests the word. “I suppose so. And then he was gone. Off to Nassau. I was so happy. I thought, well, at least one of us is out of danger.”

“Did you ever find another roommate?”

The cat jumps from her lap to the floor and commences making love to the leg of the table. She reaches down to rub his chin.

“No. In case he came home in the middle of the night, you see.”

“Oh, of course.”

She lifts an eyebrow and stares at the mantel. A pair of small, framed photographs anchor the left side, too far away to see properly. “But I don’t believe he’d mind if you shelter here for a bit.”

A pool of silence spreads between us, but it’s not the awkward silence that two ordinary women might experience, having just met, trying to think of something to say, trying to discover some common ground. It’s the common ground that holds us silent, the common ground that lies between us. She finishes her cigarette first and stubs it out in the ashtray in slow, precise thrusts. Only then does her gaze return to my face, where it spends a second or two. I have the feeling she’s trying to see me through her brother’s eyes, she’s trying to imagine me as her brother imagines me. The current in the light bulb fails, starts, fails, and returns—some interruption of the supply of electricity—and the flickering casts a strange pattern of shadows across her face, which she doesn’t seem to notice.

The cat, having wound his way among the legs of the table and chairs, reaches with his nose to sniff my skirt. I lean down and hold out my fingertips, and the delicate texture of his tongue meets my skin.

“You know, you haven’t asked me what happened,” I say.

“What happened in Nassau, you mean? No.”

“Why not?”

“I don’t believe I’m supposed to know, am I? It’s confidential.”

“But you want to know.”

“Only if you mean to tell me.”

Tuxedo pulls back on his haunches, gathers himself, and leaps onto my lap.

“That’s interesting,” says Margaret. “He doesn’t like strangers, ordinarily.”

“Do you have strangers often?”

She starts to light another cigarette. “Not often. But sometimes.”

Tuxedo kneads my thighs. A low purr starts up in his throat. He’s got long, fluffy fur, a tail like a feather duster. I lay my hand on the top of his head and stroke all the way down his back. “There was a murder,” I say. “A fellow named Harry Oakes was murdered last July, in his bed, in the middle of the night.”